“Crazy clowns beware,” writes BBC Cumbria on its official Facebook page, “Batman is in Whitehaven.” Cumbria Superheroes, a cosplayer with a rotating set of outfits including Batman, Spider-Man, Kylo Ren, and Captain America has started wearing his Batman outfit in public around Whitehaven after hearing “many children had been left traumatized [sic] by the clowns lurking around the town.”

It’s unknown if the picture of Batman pursuing a crazed clown on foot, posted in BBC Cumbria’s Facebook post, is legit. The other photos are a still from a recent Cumbria Superheroes film shooting and a screenshot of a Facebook wall post by a child thanking Batman for making him free to go to school again without fear.

Although these rampant clown sightings may be nothing more than a prank going too far, there’s legitimate science that explains why humans find clowns unnerving. “There’s a difference between the kind of scared you get during a horror film and the kind of scared you get when, God forbid, theres an active shooter, psychologist Steven Schlozman told Inverse in a previous interview. “And a lot of the science behind that has to do with things like pattern recognition and confirmation bias essentially, the things that show we’re human.”

Clowns definitely fit that weird description, but so does a man in a bat costume. But Batman is more than just a man: He’s also a symbol.